Plants are easily weakened by stress. Sources of stress include extreme changes in temperature or humidity, chemicals, biological damage and physical damage due to cutting of flowers, leaves and other parts of the plant.
The freshness and beauty of a plant will rapidly deteriorate due to these stresses.
Various chemicals have been synthesized that have some utility in restoring stress affected plants and in fumigating the soil contaminated by disease-causing germs but such chemicals adversely affect the environment and sometimes produce undesirable effects in the plants. For example, many of these chemicals nonselectively kill microorganisms, earthworms, and other lifeforms that live in soil whether they are beneficial or harmful. The resulting sterile soil requires the application of still further inorganic chemicals until the natural living order is destroyed. Some of the chemicals are harmful also to men and animals and have an irritating odor so that it is not desirable to use them at a densely-populated place.
Accordingly, many farmers are returning to the use of organic fertilizers such as compost in an effort to restore life to the soil and to break the dependency upon synthesized chemical fertilizers. It is generally difficult to fix beneficial microorganisms having an antagonism against germs causing soil diseases by isolation and direct application into the soil. It has been tried to fix the beneficial microorganisms by using organics such as rice-straw compost, sawdust, bran, peat and the like as a raw material, but in vain. Such an fixation is insufficient so that the beneficial microorganisms can not work effectively and the life-span thereof is short. Many available organic fertilizers and plant activators are not easily obtainable in large quantities, and are not as effective as some of the synthetic materials. Thus, there is a need for improved organic fertilizers, soil-disease priventives, and plant activators that can be economically produced in large quantities, but the prior art, when considered as a whole in accordance with the requirements of law, neither teaches nor suggests how such improved substances could be provided.